Product safety in the area of child care is becoming increasingly important in today's society. One area of safety that has received little attention, however, is in the area of nursing bottles. Infants are carrying or holding feeding bottles for a good part of their waking hours and the bottle may become a safety hazard in many situations.
A recent improvement has been the development of plastic infant bottles to replace glass bottles because of danger from cuts on broken glass after a bottle has shattered due to a fall. There is another aspect of bottle design, however, that has been overlooked. This is in the rigid structure of the bottle itself. In situations where the child is traveling in a vehicle while feeding from a bottle, the bottle may become a dangerous structure which can cause serious injury to the mouth and facial areas of the child in the event of a crash.
It is with the above problem in mind that the present nursing bottle has been devised to collapse upon impact and therefore help prevent injury which would otherwise be caused if the structure were rigid. Other collapsing nursing bottles have been devised. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 2,780,378 to M. Romano discloses an accordian-like infant nursing bottle which may expand and contract. This design, however, is for adjusting to various volumes of fluid only and not for collapsing under impact for safety. If impact occurs while this accordian-like bottle is being used, the liquid sealed inside the bottle would remain contained within the bottle and therefore the structure would resist collapsing, unlike the present device.